Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There's no way the majority of comments in the near future won't just be LLMs.

Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.

Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.

Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.

10th largest instance being like 10k users... we're talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media

There isn't a solution. People don't want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that's sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it's mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It's what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they're a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn't a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It's better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there's a social media not-for-profit that's trusted to manage identity, that people don't mind contributing costs to. But that's a huge undertaking. One day hopefully...

They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want.

The same analogy is applicable to food.

People want to eat fastfood because it's tasty, easily available and cheap. Healthy food is hard to come by, needs time to prepare and might not always be tasty. We have the concepts of nutrition taught at school and people still want to eat fast-food.
We have to do the same thing about social/internet literacy at school and I'm not sure whether that will be enough.

So we need a documentary like Super Size Me but for social media. I think post that documentary coming out was the only time I've seen people's attitudes change in the general population about fast food.